Hi, I'm much more of a photographer than I am an illustrator, or someone who gets really creative in photoshop. I have an image that would really benefit from the poster edges function in ps, but I hate the black splotches/spots that it creates inside the facial area of my subjects. I worked the three controls to no avail in terms of getting rid of it. Do you guys know of how to clear it up? Or is there another way of creating an illustration look to an image that is much cleaner than this?

Ron, put the edges on a layer above your photo then put a mask on it and with a black paintbrush just paint out the center or wherever you don't want the edges layer to show. I always put my brush at 100% opacity and around 10 or 15% flow for this kind of layer work.